Television (TV) has been an important component of home entertainment for over half a century. TVs have survived the Internet and PC revolution. Watching TV today, however, bears little relation to a viewer's experience in the early days of TV. Modern TV systems provide significantly improved audio and video quality, stemming from significant technological improvements. Cable and satellite delivery systems offer the user hundreds of program choices, for example. Also today's user is provided with many options to control the viewing experience, such as the ability to view two or more programs simultaneously. Often, however, users may want to share TV program events with their contacts. Constant communication is a hallmark of the present age, and users may want to share TV program information with friends sharing common interests. That communication is likely desired while users are actually watching a program, or it may be stimulated by a trigger event such as a trailer or an advertisement of a program on the TV, or even by an off-line event, such as reading a program guide.
Conventional technology allows users to share such events by messaging or calling their contacts using cell phones, computers, or the like to pass along the required information. Those techniques are all relatively cumbersome, however. For messaging, the user needs to type in program specific information such as service name, event name, event time, and event description in order to adequately inform the recipient. The user may also share an event by first recording it in the TV's memory or in the memory of a set-top-box (STB) associated with the TV, and then uploading/sending the same via the Internet. All such current forms of sharing TV program information consume time and may also cause diversion or disruption for a user in watching an ongoing program. Additionally, some of these solutions require that the TV or STB be web-enabled.
Accordingly, there exists a need for improved techniques for sharing event information in a DTV system.